


Bird's-eye View

by marmolita



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU - Comicverse, DCU Animated, Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, Nightwing (Comic), The Avengers (2012), The Avengers - All Fandoms
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-24
Updated: 2012-06-24
Packaged: 2017-11-08 11:32:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/442772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmolita/pseuds/marmolita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an origin story for Clint Barton, told through the mirror of Dick Grayson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bird's-eye View

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 6/24/2012.
> 
> Update 7/13/2012: Prosodi made the most amazing artwork ever for this. See the notes section at the end!
> 
> This was originally inspired by [this](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/5758.html?thread=6349950) kinkmeme prompt, although it doesn't really fill that prompt at all.
> 
> Warnings: I don't think the violence in this is graphic enough to warrant a graphic violence official warning, but there is violence. There is also a brief, non-graphic attempted rape, and a brief, non-graphic flashback of witnessing a rape.
> 
> Let me also say that I am only familiar with Hawkeye from The Avengers movie, so everything else I know about his origin is from reading the internet. All Nightwing material is from the comics. Since this is a crossover, obviously I am playing fast and loose with origin stories, and you don't really need to know anything about either of them for this fic to make sense.

When Dick Grayson was a baby, his mother would carry him in a sling on her back while she swung on the trapeze; nothing fancy, just out and back, out and back. His earliest memories all come with a bird’s-eye view, held high above the ring as his parents practiced their routine. When he is old enough, they let him sit on the platform while they practice, flipping and twisting in the air, making impossible catch after impossible catch. One day, his mother swings up to the platform, breathless, and says to him, “I think you’re ready to learn to fly, little robin.”

After that, his life is a blur of flying, flying, flying. Swinging back and forth, catching and releasing, somersaulting and spinning. Cozy nights curled up in his bed in his parents’ trailer. Crouching up on the platform to watch the others practice and perform. The endless road, traveling from city to city, from circus to circus as the seasons change. There are not many children in the circus, but Dick makes friends with the ones he can find. In Topeka, there is Natalie who does handstands on the back of a galloping horse. In Cleveland, Brian who hauls water and food to the circus animals. In Miami, Michael who collapses his body into impossibly small spaces. Natalie again in Portland, Michael again in Santa Fe, Brian again in New York.

In Des Moines, he meets Clint, who does whatever needs doing.

***

What would Dick Grayson be, if his parents hadn’t loved him?

***

The Flying Graysons stay with the Carson circus for a whole season. Dick, Clint, and Clint’s brother Barney spend their free time running wild through the circus, trying to learn all the different acts and showing off for each other. On their last night before moving on, Dick takes Clint up to the trapeze platform with him. “This is my favorite place,” he says. “My mom calls me ‘little robin.’ I always feel like a bird up here.” Clint gazes wide-eyed down at the ring, and feels like he is home.

Clint and Barney meet up with Dick again in Boise, and again in Rochester. By the time they meet up again in Dallas, Clint is part of the act, shooting arrows at difficult targets. He and Dick climb up to the trapeze platform and Clint shoots an arrow straight into the bullseye on the ground from 40 feet up.

Clint is there in Gotham, the terrible night when the ropes are sabotaged and Dick’s parents fall to their deaths. “You’ll be okay,” Clint tells him, holding him close. “Your parents were a hell of a lot better than mine ever were, but I know what it’s like to not have them. It will take a while, but it gets better. And you’re going to have someone to take care of you, right?”

Dick sniffles. “I want to stay with you. I want to stay with the circus. But they said I have to go with Mister Wayne.”

Clint rubs Dick’s shoulder. “He seems like he’s nice enough. Hey, the circus comes through here all the time. You can come see me, okay?” Dick nods, but Clint can still feel him shaking.

It’s not long after Dick leaves the circus that Clint gets into his first fight. The ringmaster tells him afterward, wiping the blood from his face with a wet cloth, that when townies call him a freak he should keep his mouth shut. Keeping his mouth shut has never been something Clint is good at. 

He is fifteen the first time he wins. The victory is short-lived -- one of the townies is the sheriff’s son. His first victory turns into his first arrest, shoved cursing into the squad car with his knuckles cracked and bleeding. They let him out with a warning hours later, on the promise that he will never come through Jolietville again. When he gets back to his trailer, the ringmaster tells him if he gets caught fighting again, he won’t have a job at the circus anymore.

Clint doesn’t get caught after that. He starts winning more, blackening an eye in Tulsa, bruising ribs in Peoria. As long as he doesn’t get arrested or injured enough to interfere with his act, the circus turns a blind eye.

Clint comes through Gotham every year or so. Dick is always there, in the stands. After the performance, Clint lets Dick backstage and they sit up on the trapeze platform, swinging their legs off the end and catching up. Sometimes Dick challenges Clint to hit a soda left in the stands, or a juggling ball left on the floor of the ring. Sometimes, they walk the high wire together, testing each other’s balance. Sometimes, Clint talks the staff into letting Dick onto the trapeze, and watches as Dick flips and twists through the air.

If Dick notices the bruises on Clint’s face and arms, he never says anything. Clint doesn’t ask about the cuts and scrapes he sometimes sees on Dick. Instead, he talks about how he had a falling out with Barney, how he decided to go out on his own as a solo act. Dick tells him about Wayne Manor and Alfred and schoolwork. Mostly, they talk about technique, or reminisce about years past.

When he is eighteen, Clint wins a fight behind a diner in Minneapolis. On his way home hours later, crossing through a city park, he hears footsteps behind him. Flipping up the collar of his jacket against the chill of the fall air, he quickens his pace, eyes darting through the landscape to try to find a place to hide.

He is in the middle of a soccer field when he realizes the steps are coming from in front of him as well, and he stops in his tracks to see ten young men surrounding him. Clint recognizes one of them, remembers the crack of his knuckles on the teenager’s chin. He clenches his fists and bends his knees.

They are on him all at once, and no matter how many times he ducks and twists to avoid blows, there is always another fist coming from the other side. His breath is knocked out of him by a kick to the stomach, and he hears a crack as someone else’s elbow connects with his ribs. Clint doesn’t quite dodge a fist coming at his face and the sharp pain and wetness of blood trickling down his face tell him that his nose is broken. He goes down, feet kicked out from under him, but they keep coming, fists and feet and elbows and knees.

When it is over, Clint is left alone with the silence of the park; blood cools on his face, his arms, his legs. He lays there counting the stars until a jogger finds him in the hours before dawn and calls for help.

Four days later they let him out of the hospital. It is another six weeks before he can perform again.

After that, Clint starts carrying a gun.

***

What would Clint Barton be, with a mentor like Bruce Wayne?

***

Dick has never been good at taking orders. He respects Bruce, respects Batman, but he does what he thinks is right. It doesn’t always work out for the best, and Bruce doesn’t hesitate to let him know when he’s made a mistake. Most of the time, Bruce never talks, and Dick never stops talking, but when Dick has disobeyed an order, their roles are reversed. Bruce yells, and Dick bites his tongue, anger welling up inside of him. How many times has he challenged Bruce’s authority? How many times has Bruce fired him?

Batman is a hard task-master, and Dick learns. He learns to fight, learns to push through pain, learns to make his enemies fear him. He learns to hack into computer systems and fly planes. He learns to read his enemy’s body language, and two hundred different techniques to cause excruciating pain without inflicting permanent injury. The one thing he cannot learn is how to be a follower, which is why whenever he is not with Batman, he is always a leader. It is why things come to a breaking point and Dick walks away from being Robin.

For a while, he thinks maybe he can just be Dick Grayson. He thinks about Clint and wonders if there are any job openings at the circus Clint is traveling with, but circus performers are hard to track down. Dick goes back to the circus he knows the best, back to the trapeze. It is comfortable, familiar, but it is not home anymore. Home is Alfred bringing him sandwiches in the cave after patrol. Home is swinging between rooftops in the dead of night. He can’t go back to the cave, not anymore, but he can still find a measure of solace on the rooftops, using the knowledge that Bruce gave him, and so he leaves the circus again to become Nightwing.

Being replaced is never easy, and even though he doesn’t want to go back to being Robin, it is hard for Dick to see someone else in his costume. It is hard to believe that after all they have been through together, Bruce can swap him out for someone else like replacing a part in his Batmobile. Dick remembers what Bruce had been like, those first few weeks after Dick’s parents had died, and wonders what happened to the man he knew then.

It is harder still, years later, when Batman is broken by Bane and asks a stranger to take up his mantle.

The flying trapeze is all about trust. Trust in your body to do what you tell it, trust in yourself to know when to move, trust in your partner to be there to catch you. Trust has never been a problem for Dick; if anything it’s been his weakness. No matter how many conflicts they have, no matter how many times he thinks he and Bruce are reconciled, he never is completely convinced that Bruce trusts him. Maybe he is right.

When he moves to Bludhaven, Dick uses the physical space to make a separation between them, to try not to think about Batman, to try to be his own man. He makes his own rules, does what he thinks is right, and is only accountable to himself, but every time he throws a batarang or hooks his grapple, Bruce is there in the back of his mind.

***

What would Dick Grayson be without Bruce Wayne?

***

Clint carries the gun but he doesn’t use it until he is twenty, overpowered in a back alley by a man twice his size. He wrestles it out of his pants, struggling against the weight of the man holding him down, and doesn’t think twice about pulling the trigger. The man slumps on top of him, wetness spreading out from his stomach over Clint’s hand, and Clint rolls the man off and runs.

The circus packs up and leaves the same night and he goes with them, crossing state lines into Pennsylvania. He never finds out if the man lives or dies.

Clint often climbs up to the trapeze platform, after everyone is asleep. The height is calming to him; the world down below seems sharper than it does when he is in the middle of it. He looks at the trapeze and thinks about Dick.

He is on the platform late at night when there is a crash below, and Mona the fire dancer runs into the ring, tripping over juggling clubs and sprawling out on the floor. Three men are behind her, and Clint can hear Mona’s ragged, sobbing breath. She tries to get up but a man in a leather jacket grabs her ankle and pulls her back down. He slaps her in the face, and Clint sees blood. The other men are close behind, leering, reaching for Mona’s clothes. He thinks about his mother, struggling in his father’s grip, the smell of alcohol overpowering. He thinks about Barney’s hand covering his mouth in the closet, heart beating fast against his back. Clint doesn’t realize the gun is in his hand until he is firing, three rapid shots, into an eye, an ear, the back of a head.

Mona screams; the lights go up as people start rushing into the tent. Clint lowers his hand and puts the gun down next to him. His hand is not shaking.

There is no getting off with a warning this time, no quick trip across state lines. Clint is taken to the county jail and given a standard issue jumpsuit. He doesn’t have enough money to make bail or hire a good lawyer. “Why didn’t you just yell or something?” his public defender asks. “Or just fire into the air? Why did you have to kill them?” Clint looks at the grain of wood on the table and doesn’t have an answer.

Prison is a mixed bag. His fingers itch for a bowstring, but he settles for practicing his aim by throwing pebbles at pigeons in the exercise yard. There is no trapeze platform to retreat to, so he finds what peace he can on the top bunk in his cell. Clint is a brawler and can hold his own against one or two other guys, but his loud mouth gets him into more fights than he can handle. He is winning a fight in the yard when the guards come to pull him off the other man, and he is so angry that he punches one of the guards in the face and takes out the other with a kick to his knees. His fellow prisoners start cheering and yelling, but the alarm has been raised and guards swarm the yard.

Clint is hauled off to the hole for three days. When they take him out, they do not bring him back to his regular cell. Instead he is taken first to the showers, then to a closed visiting room. They lock his handcuffs to the table and leave him. This is the same room where he met with the public defender before his trial. He hasn’t been here since getting handed his sentence -- hasn’t had any visitors in prison. There is a chip in the corner of the table, and Clint wonders how many fights have happened in this room.

He is still looking at the chipped table when the door opens, and a tall black man with an eye patch walks in. “I have a proposition for you, Mr. Barton,” the man says as he sits down on the other side of the table. Clint listens.

***

It is hard to make friends as a vigilante, but Dick takes them where he can find them. In Gotham, there is Barbara, who knows computers inside and out. In Central City, Wally who can run faster than the speed of sound.

One night in Bludhaven, he meets Clint again. Clint hands him a business card for a government agency, and when Dick asks what sort of job Clint does for them, he replies, “Whatever needs doing.”

**Author's Note:**

> All the brilliant ideas about Clint getting into fights and the first time he shoots someone came directly from prosodi and really inspired most of this. Thanks also to quigonejinn for setting me straight and giving this fic direction, as she always does!
> 
> Prosodi also made the most amazing artwork for this fic:  
> 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Bird's-Eye View (the We Wanted The World To Know Our Names remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12052818) by [geckoholic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/pseuds/geckoholic)




End file.
